USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV > Part 53
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FIRST PERIOD, 1810-1841. - Music, as an independent art, claiming consideration on its own account, not merely as a convenient handmaid of religion, properly began in Boston with the present century, and first took organic form in the Handel and Haydn Society in 1815. That was a small beginning, modest in its aim and its ambition. It sprang, to be sure, mainly out of the New England psalm-singing choir and village singing- school; but these elements, as we have said, did not contain the germs of musical progress ; or if they did, there was still wanting the musician, the man of knowledge and artistic power, to quicken and develop them. There was none such here; he had to come from the Old World. There came, we may say, two about that time.
The first was a German, probably the pioneer of all the German musi- cians who have since sought our shore and done so much to make our Boston musical. Gottlieb Graupner is still remembered and respected as the first important teacher here of the piano-forte and music generally, -a leader in all musical good works, though with a meagre following. He engraved
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music for his pupils, for which he kept a salesroom in his house in Franklin Street, in which he also had a little music hall. We remember in our boy- hood seeing him lead the little orchestra in the old Federal-Street Theatre, with his double-bass! He was a famous " timist." But his peculiar in- strument was the oboe (hautboy). This he had played in London, in Haydn's orchestra, when that great master brought out the twelve famous Symphonies in Salomon's concerts (1791-92). His family preserve the parchment certificate of his honorable discharge from service as oboist in the band of a Hanoverian regiment, dated Hameln, April 8, 1788. In 1791 he went to London; thence he came over to Prince Edward Island; then spent some time in Charleston, S. C., where he landed in 1796 or 1797; there he married, and came to Boston in 1798. Of course he did what he could to make Haydn, and perhaps Pleyel, Gyrowetz, and others, known here, too, in this musical wilderness. With a few associates he formed the nucleus of the first meagre combination which could be called in any sense an orchestra. Of professional musicians there was not half a score in the town; but Mr. Graupner and his little knot of musical friends, mostly amateurs, formed a " Philo-harmonic Society " in 1810 or 1811, which was still in existence when the Handel and Haydn Society was formed. It was simply a social meeting, held on Saturday evenings, in Mr. Graupner's hall for some time, afterward in Pythian Hall, in Pond (now Bedford) Street, where in their small way they practised Haydn's Symphonies, etc., for their own enjoyment. Graupner was president as long as it existed. Mr. Bryant P. Tilden was vice-president, and Mr. William Coffin secretary. When it finally died out we do not learn. Its last concert of which we find an- nouncement was on Nov. 24, 1824, at the Pantheon, Boylston Square. How many members there were, or what their instruments, we cannot learn precisely. There may have been sixteen of them. Mr. Graupner led with his double-bass. For violins they had Mr. Thomas Granger and Mr. Asa Warren; and, we. believe, the English Consul, Mr. Dixon, and the well known Russian Consul, Alexis Eustaphieve (whose daughter, Mme. Peruzzi, still living in Florence, was a great pianist for that day), were interested in the club, and lent their aid with violins, if they were not actually members. Mr. Granger, Sr., played the clarinet; Mr. Simon Wood, the bassoon; Mr. Rowson, the trumpet. They also had French horn and tympani, and bass viol (violoncello). The flute was played by Mr. Pollock, afterward by Mr. George Cushing, for many years cashier in the old Columbian Bank, who spent most of his later years in Hingham, his old home, in full possession of his faculties until within a short time of his death, which occurred last summer (1880), at the age of ninety-four, in Watertown. To the end of his life Mr. Cushing was an enthusiastic admirer of Haydn and Mozart, and a stanch advocate of the classical as against the " new-school" music.
These slight particulars are deemed of interest as showing the beginning of anything like orchestral music in the old town. Before there could be oratorios, there had to be some sort of an orchestra.
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Another educated musician from the old world, who must have exer- cised considerable influence, was an English Doctor of Music, G. K. Jackson, for several years the learned organist at Trinity Church, who arrived here just before the War of 1812. He was a man of Falstaffian proportions, who seems to have lorded it among the small fry with a full sense of his own professional importance. Doubtless he, with one or two other English organists of less note, who officiated in some of the half-dozen churches which had organs, introduced here some examples of a higher class of English cathedral music, as well as extracts from Handel, Haydn, etc., in place of the pre- vailing dry and uninspiring psalmody. We find no mention of his name among the founders of the Handel and Haydn; nor was he the organist in their first oratorios. It seems that since he was not allowed to rule the movement, he preferred to take no part in it. He did, however, fellowship with Graupner, and lent the assistance of his " erudite talents" "at the piano-forte and carillons," in a complimentary concert given to the latter in November, 1821, when also Signor Ostinelli and his future wife, Miss Hewitt, played together a grand duo by Kalkbrenner. Thus to England and to Germany we owe the first musical awakening and most of the subsequent stimulus to progress here.
Of the musical condition of Boston at this time (1810-14), we may gather an idea from some reminiscences of that musical veteran, whose en- thusiasm is still fresh at eighty, General H. K. Oliver. He writes : -
" From 1810 to 1814 the writer, a Boston lad, having a high soprano voice, was a singing-boy, with two or three others, in the choir of the Park Street Church, - a choir consisting of some fifty singers, and deservedly renowned for its admirable rendering of church music, ignoring the prevalent fugue-tunes of the day, and giving the more appropriate and correct hymn-tunes and anthems of the best English com- posers. Out of this choir came many of the original members of the Handel and Haydn Society. There was then no organ at Park Street, the accompaniment of their singing being given by a flute, a bassoon, and a violoncello. At that remote date very few musical instruments of any sort were to be found in private houses. In the entire population of Boston, of some six thousand families, not fifty piano-fortes could be found."
Thus, from that famous Park Street choir, from the little Philo-harmonic orchestra, and somewhat also from the few English organists and choir- directors then established in the town, our ancient Oratorio Society drew the first sources of its life. Nor was the outward impulse wanting which should crystallize these elements into a concrete form. It came in the shape of a Peace Jubilee, after the war with England.1 The "Gilmore" thereof was, we are told, the high and mighty Dr. Jackson; and it was certainly a graceful piece of condescension in the Englishman to take the initiative.
Concerts, such as they were, were not unknown in Boston during the sixty or seventy years before this (1815). The Hon. R. C. Winthrop, in his admirable address at the opening of the first Musical Festival of the
1 [See the opening chapter in the present volume. - ED.]
VOL. IV. - 53.
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Handel and Haydn Society, in May, 1857, enumerates some of them, dwell- ing particularly. on a miscellaneous " Oratorio given at King's Chapel on Oct. 27, 1789, in honor of President Washington's visit to Boston." After a glowing description of the Peace Jubilee (also in King's Chapel, Feb. 22, 1815,) he adds: -
" Its echoes had hardly died away, - four weeks, indeed, had scarcely elapsed since it was held, - before a notice was issued by Gottlieb Graupner, Thomas Smith Webb, and Asa Peabody, for a meeting of those interested in the subject 'of cultivat- ing and improving a correct taste in the performance of sacred music.' In that meet- ing, held on the 30th of March, 1815, the Handel and Haydn Society originated. On the 20th of April their constitution was adopted. The following May-day witnessed their first private practising from the old Locke Hospital collection ; and on the suc- ceeding Christmas evening, at the same consecrated chapel where Washington at- tended that memorable public concert a quarter of a century before, and where that solemn Jubilee of Peace had been so recently celebrated, their first Grand Oratorio was given to a delighted audience of nine hundred and forty-five persons, with the Russian Consul, the well remembered Mr. Eustaphieve, assisting as one of the per- formers in the orchestra."
On this occasion, as we learn from the Programme Book of the last Triennial Festival (1880) -
"The chorus numbered about one hundred, of which perhaps ten were ladies ; an orchestra, of less than a dozen, and an organ furnished the accompaniments. The programme was long and varied, and included selections from the Creation and the Messiah and other works by Handel."
It was not until the seventeenth concert, Christmas, 1818, that a complete oratorio was performed. This was the Messiah ; liberal selections from it had been given in the previous concerts. The Creation came next (Feb. 16, 1819). Musical Boston of that day knew only these two oratorios: the Messiah (composed in 1741) and the Creation (1798); and to this limited acquaintance with the great composers the old society undoubtedly owes the name adopted in its " green and salad days." The fittest names to figure jointly in one title would obviously now be those of Bach and Handel, the two greatest masters and contemporaries; but probably Amer- ica had not yet heard of John Sebastian Bach; nor did the founders of the Handel and Haydn Society dream of the devotion with which their successors of the past decade would be studying and performing his St. Matthew Passion Music.
Now, for the sake of landmarks, or tidemarks, to guide us in this brief sketch of our musical history, we shall regard the foundation of the Handel and Haydn Society, and the beginning of acquaintance with Handel's Mes- siah, as the first station on our pilgrimage, - the first musical event really pregnant with an important future. From this point we will barely cata- logue the work of the society until we reach our second station, about the year 1841.
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From 1818 to 1880 the Messiah has been given over seventy times by the society ; the Creation, over sixty times. Handel's Dettingen Te Deum was taken up in 1819, and has since been given twice ; in the same year the Sixth Mass (B-flat) of Haydn, which was sung eleven times to March 19, 1837; in 1829 a Mass in C by Mozart was sung; in 1830 Haydn's Storm, seven times to 1837; and in 1831 his Te Deum in C; in 1833 Beethoven's Mount of Olives, eight times to 1837. From 1836 to 1840 was the period in which the questionable taste for Neukomm's compositions reigned. His sensational oratorio of David was given fifty-seven times between 1836 and 1859.
Thus the repertoire of the society was as meagre, measured by its pres- ent standard, as was the average quality of its performances inferior. Yet it had more than kept pace with the best musical culture of our people ; and our " Athens" could at least congratulate herself upon a certain fond familiarity with two of the greatest master-works of the art long before they were much in vogue in any of her sister cities.
With such materials, and with smaller selections from composers of less consequence, the society gave, either in the shape of oratorios or miscel- laneous concerts, commonly on Sunday evenings, down to the year 1841, about two hundred and twenty performances, - from one to nineteen in . a single year. The first seven were given in the Stone Chapel; 1 the eighth in the First Church ; then one hundred and ninety-one (to November, 1839) in Boylston Hall; and numbers two hundred to three hundred and ninety- six in the Melodeon (now the Gaiety Theatre). These were small halls compared with our present spacious Music Hall, the Melodeon seating about twelve hundred people.
The membership has always been confined to the male sex. The ladies sing by invitation. The original members numbered forty-six. Before the first performance of the Messiah (1818) there were added one hundred and sixty-two by election; and two hundred and eighteen more down to 1841. Yet during our first period the chorus, male and female, was but small; in 1839 the average attendance at public performances was only about fifty, and the parts were poorly balanced, while some occupants of chorus seats were reckoned " dummies." The time for real chorus dis- cipline had not arrived. The average tone of membership, for many years, was hardly one of cultured refinement; " first families " were not much represented in the ranks; mechanics, tradesmen, market-men, etc., were those who sacrificed themselves in the good cause, and greatly to their credit. No aristocratic English "Mus. Doc." could go in on equal terms in what he probably regarded as rather a plebeian movement; nor would the democratic instinct accept him for president or musical director. How good the singing was, it is hardly possible at this time to conjecture. For orchestra there could have been only an inadequate assemblage of a dozen or more available instruments. During all this period, and indeed until
1 [King's Chapel was popularly so called for many years' after the era of Independence. - ED.]
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1847, the president of the society officiated as conductor. The first presi- dent was Thomas Smith Webb, two years; then followed Benjamin Holt, two years; Amasa Winchester, seven years; Robert Rogerson; Lowell Mason (1827), five years; Samuel Richardson, two years; Chas. W. Lovett, two years; Bartholomew Brown; George J. Webb, three years (to 1841) ; Charles Zeuner; I. S. Withington. The organists were : for the first three concerts, Samuel Stockwell; for the four following, S. P. Taylor of New York; S. A. Cooper and S. P. Taylor, elected in 1818; Miss S. Hewitt (afterward Mrs. Ostinelli), elected 1820, and annually for nine years ; Charles Zeuner, 1830-37; A. U. Hayter, 1838-49.
The leading vocalists who sang the solos in the oratorios and other concerts during this period are easily enumerated. It was home talent mainly. Mr. Oliver Shaw of Providence, R. I., who had become blind, gave here four concerts in 1816, moving audiences to tears, it is said, by the sweetness of his voice and by the beauty of his own songs, which were long popular, - such as "There's nothing true but Heaven," and " Sinful Mary's Tears." He was one of the earliest honorary members of the society. Its first president, Colonel Webb, and Mr. John Dodd were also vocal heroes in those days. The leading soprano for some years was a Miss Bennett. James Sharp, from England, joined in 1816, whose fine tenor voice and pure, artistic style of singing were marked features of the orato- rios for more than fifty years. From 1825 figured Mr. Chas. W. Lovett, tenor; and the doughty "David" and the " Goliath " in Neukomm's David, -Mr. Marcus Coburn, robust tenor, and Mr. Samuel Richardson, a basso of large frame. Mr. George Hews, alto, or counter-tenor, sang in 1830, and for many years thereafter. Mr. B. F. Baker and Mr. Thomas Ball, the sculptor, began to appear as bass soloists in 1837-38. Of soprano and alto soloists before 1830 we find no names; but from that time to 1835 and later there were Mrs. Knight, Miss Gillingham, Mrs. Adams, and particularly Mrs. Franklin (one of the three Woodward sisters, all prominent in the music of that day), who was for many years the leading oratorio soprano. Of visiting artists from abroad, the first who truly helped the cause of good music here was Thomas Phillips, a tenor singer, who, after appearing in some slight English operas in New York and Boston, sang here in ora- torio in 1818, and also gave a course of lectures on the art of singing, with illustrations from the best masters in the various styles of vocal com- position. In the preceding year Incledon, near the close of his career, had made a passing visit, singing his famous Dibdin sailor-songs. But probably the most distinguished artist during all that period, a revelation to our untutored ears, was Mme. Caradori Allan, the soprano, who astonished and delighted all by her singing in the Messiah at Boylston Hall in 1837. Of course the list is very incomplete, nor have we room to be complete in such particulars.
Among the instrumentalities which helped to raise the musical standard in the Boston of that period were the publications of the Handel and Haydn
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Society. For choral practice it soon felt the want of works of real genius, music more nourishing than the simple anthems in the Locke Hospital col- lection ; and very soon it issued several books of anthems, masses, choruses, etc., from the best masters, English, German, and Italian. In 1821 (dated 1822) appeared the first Boston Handel and Haydn Society collection of church music, mostly psalm-tunes, selected and harmonized by Lowell Mason, afterward made Doctor of Music by the University of New York. This gentleman, who from this time becomes one of the most prominent figures in our musical activity, and whose influence was long, wide-spread, and various, on the whole for good, was born at Medfield, Mass., in 1792, and died at Orange, N. J., in 1872. At the age of twenty he became a banking clerk in Savannah, Ga. But the passion of his youth, and of all his life, was music, with which were coupled a life-long religious zeal and great business enterprise and shrewdness. He was a manager of men, an organ- izer of movements educational and popular, -some of them of lasting influ- ence. In Savannah, with the aid of his first thoroughly instructed teacher, F. L. Abel, he made a manuscript collection for his own use, based on the Sacred Melodies of William Gardiner, the English enthusiast who wrote that fanciful book The Music of Nature. Gardiner had cut and arranged into psalm-tunes many exquisite melodies out of the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and the like. These, with the best tunes then in vogue in England, -and a few American, some of them his own,- formed the basis of the collection which Dr. Mason prepared for the Han- del and Haydn Society, and which ran through numerous editions, with improvements and enlargement, year by year. It was a wholly new, bold venture on the part of the society; nor was it undertaken until the learned Dr. Jackson had set his seal of approval on the contents of the book, adding a few compositions of his own. It soon passed into the New England " sing- ing-schools," and thence into the choirs; and psalm-book making has been a prosperous branch of trade from that day to this.
In 1837 some discontented elements in the old society, unfortunately for both, withdrew and formed a new oratorio society, - the Musical Insti- tute of Boston, - with Bartholomew Brown and the Hon. Nahum Mitchell for its first two presidents, and Ostinelli and Thomas Comer, of the Tremont Theatre, for musical directors. For several years it gave concerts in the Masonic Temple (now the United States Court House), its most important production being that of Mehul's Joseph and his Brethren, which is prop- erly an opera. It also brought out a sensational and short-lived oratorio, the Sceptic, under the direction of the composer, Russell, a popular ballad- singer of the day.
Outside of these oratorio societies there was not much else in Boston, either in the way of schools or musical performance, which can be supposed to have exerted any very material influence on the progress of musical taste or knowledge during this whole period. Concerts were few, and far from classical ; programmes very miscellaneous and of slight material. Great
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artists, either vocal or instrumental, had hardly begun to find their way to this haunt of the east wind. There were no orchestral concerts; sympho- nies, since the days of those Philo-harmonic amateurs, were unheard; the same of chamber-music, violin quartets, etc. The Siren of Italian opera had not begun to practise here her spells. There had only been a few slender efforts in the shape of English opera at the old Tremont Theatre (now Temple). The music of polite society consisted mostly of Moore's Irish melodies and the old Scotch and English ballads, with possibly some pieces from Italian and from Mozart's operas, and the duets of that fashion- able European teacher and composer Blangini, whose list of pupils has been said to " read like Leporello's catalogue, as it includes three queens, twelve princesses, twenty-five countesses," etc. Boston had, however, a few glee-clubs, thanks to the enthusiasm mainly of Mr. Wm. H. Eliot. The harp was perhaps better known in parlors then than it is now; that twilight senti- mental instrument vanishing before the sunrise of high art. The piano-fortes, then comparatively few, tinkled with popular melodies, marches, variations, by Kalkbrenner and others, and show-pieces like the Battle of Prague; although some of the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven had found a home in certain houses. The concert programmes corresponded. Very popular in those last years were the English ballad-singers, - Wilson with his Scotch songs; Russell with his Maniac and Life on the Ocean Wave ; Dempster with his sentimental Tennyson's May Queen ; and Mr. J. P. Knight, whose programmes were more classical and made appeal to better taste.
Much might be learned of the musical tastes of that period from a list of the publications which were in demand; but no chronological lists are possible so long as music publishers refuse to date their issues, - probably acting on the same principle on which women are maliciously accused of trying to conceal their age.
Among other incitements and sweet opportunities, the music-loving school-boy of the period (about 1825) must not refuse the debt of grati- tude to the military band which, under the name of the Brigade Band, would tempt his feet to follow through the streets beyond the city's bounds, though he might find the homeward journey tiresome without the music. Many a Boston boy caught the tuneful fever from those dulcet and inspiring strains. And that was a real band; it had clarinets and flutes and oboes, bugles and French horns (some famous players too!), and was not the mere band of brass now used to penetrate the Babel of street noises. Moreover it played good music, - notably a large number of good Ger- man marches composed by one Walsch, which were arranged and adopted into the repertoire of the little Pierian Sodality of Harvard College.1
1 It will surprise some to learn that musical Boston in those days of its infancy was not with- out its musical journals. As early as 1820-21 Mr. John Rowe Parker owned and edited the Euterpeiad, a fortnightly Musical Intelligencer, of really high tone, in every way respectable, and
ably seconding the efforts of those who were try- ing to elevate the standard of musical art, free from all the meretricious and commercial fea- tures of so many modern periodicals devoted nominally to music. In the second year he added to each number an appendix or Gazette for
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SECOND PERIOD, 1841-52. - As Handel's Messiah stands for the cen- tral figure thus far, marking the first stage in our musical development, so now we place another figure at the beginning of a second period, - say from 1841 to 1852. Beethoven, bringing the Fifth Symphony, stands there at the entrance of a yet richer garden of enchantment, beckoning us on the way that we should go. Beethoven's symphonies were first heard in Boston in the year 1841, and onward; and, strange to say, these were our first initiation into the glories and the mysteries of the symphonic form of art. We were introduced to its profoundest, greatest master, with no prepar- atory schooling in the simpler creations of his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart. As Handel came to us through the Handel and Haydn Society, Beethoven came ushered in by the long-since defunct Boston Academy of Music, which thus set the crown upon its many useful labors. And now, this second station gained, we have to look back a few years.
The Academy existed earlier, although its centre of gravity falls. here. It was founded Jan. 8, 1833. Its aim was educational. It sprang from the suggestion of Mr. William C. Woodbridge. This gentleman, on a tour through Europe, had been struck by the attention paid to music as a part of early education in several of the countries which he visited, and became convinced of its good effects and of its practicability as a branch of common education here. He found ready listeners and coworkers in those practical educators Lowell Mason and George J. Webb, and in the Hon. Samuel A. Eliot; and the Academy of Music was established, with Mr. Eliot as president, and under the immediate direction of the two former gentlemen as principal professors. Other teachers were enlisted; among them, in the instrumental department, Henry Schmidt, the able violinist, and Joseph A. Keller, for years at the head of the musical instruction at the Perkins Insti- tution for the Blind. "The experiment succeeded beautifully," said Mr. Eliot.1 In the course of the second year juvenile and adult classes had been established, and gratuitous vocal instruction given to nearly one thou- sand children and to from four hundred to five hundred adults. It introduced music into the public schools, - Messrs. Mason and Webb first trying the experiment in several schools, to the entire satisfaction of the masters and the school committee. It formed classes for teachers in music. The choir of the Academy already counted one hundred members of both sexes, trained to nice performance of good music. This choir had given six oratorio concerts, in which selections from the best masters were sung with organ accompaniment, and had furnished music on several civic occasions. Lectures, with illustrations, were given in various churches, and in other
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